Contributor spotlight: Harry Martland, Booking.com

In the realm of open-source, the community plays a major role in building innovative products. No matter the form the contribution takes, feedback, code contribution, bug reports, or word of mouth, Mockoon wouldn't be what it has become without all of you. We started this series of interviews to put some more light on the contributors who spent time crafting features or fixing bugs for the benefit of all. Today, we are talking with Harry Martland, Principal Engineer at Booking.com, who shares his enthusiasm for contributing to and using Mockoon.

 Can you introduce yourself and your background in software development, your passions or hobbies?

Hi, I'm Harry (@HarryEMartland), I started my software career the boring way of going to university. I have been working for Booking.com for over eight years and have worked my way up to be a principal engineer. Outside of work, I am interested in home automation and occasionally dabble in gaming.

Contributing to open-source is a great opportunity to learn something new and give back.

Harry Martland

Contributor & Principal Engineer @ Booking.com

 How long have you been using Mockoon? Are there any particular contributions you've made that you'd like to emphasize or showcase?

Mockoon is fairly new to me, however, I see massive potential with its serverless support and user-friendly UI. I contributed the response fallback functionality which allows you to still use a proxy if no rules for a route match a request.

 What inspired you to contribute to a project like Mockoon and open-source in general?

I saw the potential in mockoon at Booking.com for its serverless support but it had a missing feature which we needed. I could see others needed this too and rather than just asking, I thought I could give it a go at implementing.

 How do you balance your contributions with other commitments? Are your open-source contributions part of your work (as an employee)?

I am lucky as a principal engineer that I can manage my own time and work on making things better for engineers. I do sometimes flex with these kinds of things and do some work in my own time as I enjoy it.

 What general advice would you give to someone interested in contributing to open-source projects?

At Booking we have 10% personal development time, I would encourage others to use this time to contribute to open-source, as it is a great opportunity to learn something new and give back. If you're nervous about contributing to open source, what's the worst that can happen? They just won't accept your merge request.

 What makes Mockoon unique compared to other API mocking tools? Can you share some key features or functionalities that you find particularly useful?

I really like the serverless functionality and the user-friendly UI.

 Have you integrated Mockoon into any specific projects or workflows, and if so, how has it improved or streamlined those processes?

We're using Mockoon to mock error scenarios and hard-to-reach situations. This allows us to test without a complicated setup and in a deterministic way.

 What are your favorite tools or resources for software development outside of Mockoon?

I love Jet brains IDEs as they do most of the work for me. Don't forget the technologies' own websites. They want to help you so generally they have pretty good documentation. Take Mockoon.com for example!

We thank Harry for sharing his journey with us. We are grateful he chose to dedicate his time and talent to improving projects like Mockoon, making it an indispensable tool for developers worldwide.

More interviews are in the pipeline. Be sure not to miss any by subscribing to our newsletter or joining our Discord server. Happy mocking!